Keep an eye out for them when they are published, I have read the early manuscripts and they are incredibly good. Through Struggle, the Stars by John J. Lumpkin. Late breaking news, the novel is now available in eBook form. Read about it here. Late breaking news: Through Struggle, the Stars is now available in eBook formatThrough Struggle, the Stars is now available in paperback format The Desert of Stars by John J. The Humanist Inheritance (aka The Last Great War) by Matthew Lineberger You can find more details on this page.

Bad Astronomy - Slate. Drawing by NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-CalTech I have some cautiously exciting exoplanets news: Astronomers have announced the discovery of a planet that is very nearly the same size as Earth and orbiting its star in the habitable zone—that is, at the right distance from its star to have liquid water on its surface.

We don’t know how Earth-like it is, but this shows that we’re edging closer and closer to finding another Earth, and this one is the best bet we’ve found so far. The planet is called Kepler-186f and was discovered using the Kepler Space Telescope, which was designed to look for planets orbiting other stars. Kepler exploits what’s called the transit method: It stares at 150,000 stars all the time, looking for dips in the amount of light received from every star. The idea is that if a star has planets, and if we see the orbits edge-on, then every time the planet passes between us and its parent star it’ll block an teensy bit of light (usually far less than 1 percent).

But the New York Times reports: A review of studies has found that the health benefits of infant male circumcision vastly outweigh the risks involved in the procedure. Actually, it doesn’t. Not at all. The paper is all about the frequency of circumcision in the US; this is the only real data in the paper, and notice that a good chunk of it is speculation. Prevalence of adult circumcision in the United States during the past 6 decades (1948-2010). It does toss in a table purporting to show the tremendous risks of not circumcising baby boys, but this is not new — these are the same sloppy data that the author has been peddling for over a decade.